Emotional Connectivity and Customer Experience

They may forget what you said — but they will never forget how you made them feel.

This statement coined by CARL W. BUEHNER in 1971 holds today as much relevance as ever.

As a customer, you might experience countless interactions with your service providers; negotiating with your cable or phone company, handling auto claim over a phone in stressed situation, enquiring your health insurance while at hospital etc.

How often have you been empathetically answered?

How often did we feel emotionally connected?

How many times did you really feel that the company’s representative has genuinely put efforts to understand your problem?

Did they go out of their way to help you and exceed your expectation?

Believe me, if they do so, you as a customer will feel that.

During my recent trip to Goa, India, I stayed at a resort near Miramar beach. While I was having breakfast with my family, the chef stopped by our table noticing that my 6-year-old was not showing interest in the breakfast and trying to escape the scene. He could sense the situation very quickly and offered my daughter a creative preparation which he guaranteed she may not resist. My daughter promptly agreed to the offer. The chef returned within five minutes with a Mickey Mouse shaped pancake with chocolate sauce. My daughter, my wife and I were amused. I had never seen my daughter finishing off her plate so fast.

Every leading customer experience company has motivated employees who symbolize the customer and brand promise in their interactions with consumers and are empowered to do the right thing. Companies centered on customers, engage them at every level of the organization.

Brands personify organizations, and that’s how companies emotionally connect with customers. Knowing what a brand stands for helps customers choose and emotionally connect with the brands. And this is just a beginning. Once you start using the products or services at various touchpoint levels, you will interact with brand representatives, and those interactions matters equally-as exemplified before, to determine your emotional connectivity with the brand.

Knowing what should and shouldn’t be done to be a best-in-class company is not a rocket science. The important factor is to get your heads and hearts for the intended change. The collective sense of conviction and purpose to serve the customer’s true needs is the bottom line.

A company can roll out a process of learning about its customers’ emotional drivers and leverage them to enhance the overall customer experience or at the other end of the spectrum may leverage data and analytics to understand what motivates customers to stay and what frustrates them to leave. Companies across industries are in the process of understanding the need of establishing emotional connection and using it to attract and retain customers. The leaders are making emotional connection part of their Customer Experience strategy and involving every function in the value chain, from product development and marketing to sales and support.

According to HBR, there are hundreds of emotional motivators that drive human behavior, however there are ten which have significant impact, e.g. Stand out from the crowd, Have confidence In the future, read full list here.

How does CFN measure emotional connectivity?

CFN has built an internal dictionary that has 10,000+ words touching a wide spectrum of human emotions and feelings, both positive and negative. Our data science team has allocated a numeric score and polarity to each and every emotion.

We referenced Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions and put that into customers’ perspective to come up with a list of emotions that hugely impact customer behavior and actions.

CFN analyzes the entire customer journey and constructs emotional score on various impactful touchpoints. We use statistical techniques to gauge the correlation between emotional score and financial metrics e.g. churn, subscription renewal or revenue.

To know where your company stands in terms of Customers Experience, take our Best Practice Assessment now and you will receive a complimentary assessment on your company’s CFN RatingTM and comparison against your competitors.

CustomersFirst Now (CFN) has been refining our CX solutions for more than 40 years—working with and for many Fortune 100 companies. We provide the only proven, predictive processthat links Customer Delight to financial performance by incorporating and measuring CX Best Practices across all key business disciplines. For more information, contact Amit Garg, Leader- Data Science, at agarg@customersfirstnow.com